Peer support telephone dyads for elderly women: Was this the wrong intervention?

Tested a preventive intervention in which peer telephone dyads were developed for low-income, community-living, elderly women with low perceived social support. After an initial assessment, respondents were randomly assigned to either an assessment-only control or received 10 weeks of friendly staff telephone contact. After a second assessment, participants receiving the staff contact were randomly assigned to continue that contact or were paired in dyads to continue phone contact with one another. Dependent variables were measures of perceived social support, morale, depression, and loneliness. All groups, particularly the staff contact group, showed some improvement in mental health scores over time, but there were no significant differences between intervention groups, or between intervention and assessment-only control groups. The results suggest that participation in the study and in personal assessment interviews at home were probably morale enhancing, and that additional telephone contact did not significantly add to that effect. Evidence also indicates that, in this sample, low perceived family support was significantly related to poor mental health, so it is possible that a program designed to increase friend support may have been the wrong intervention.     

An instrumented method for assessment and remediation of stuttering: A single-subject case study

A single-subject experimental design was used to investigate the feasibility of applying non-invasive laboratory instrumentation for examining speech physiology to assessment and biofeedback-based remediation of stuttering. Physiologic assessment facilitated the development of behavioral goals directed at changing respiratory and phonatory behaviors for this subject. Visual biofeedback therapy produced reduction in respiratory discontinuities and increased phonatory continuity, concomitant with reduced perceivable molar dysfluency. Methods used in this case illustrate a variety of options and problems related to clinical use of instrumentation. Results suggest that signals which represent respiratory, phonatory, and articulatory physiologic events may be clinically practical for evaluating and altering perceivable dysfluency.     

The observational study of adolescent gambling in UK amusement arcades

In the UK, excessive fruit machine playing is the most documented form of pathological gambling amongst adolescents. Although there have been a few retrospective questionnaire studies in adolescent fruit machine gambling, there has been very little systematic observational fieldwork into the behaviour. The studies reported explore the social world of fruit machine playing using data collected via the monitoring of 33 UK amusement arcades employing participant and non-participant observation methodologies. The basic aims were to observe the arcade clientele and their behavioural characteristics, and to examine motivations for machine playing. Results suggest that level of adolescent gambling depends upon both time of day and time of year, and regular players conform to rules of etiquette and display stereotypical behaviours when playing fruit machines. The results also suggest that adolescents play fruit machines for a wide range of reasons including fun, to win money, to socialize, to escape and for excitement, and that inland and coastal arcades are frequented by different clienteles, probably as a function of the amusement machine available.     

The fear potentiated startle effect

A differential conditioning study examined whether an acoustic startle probe, presented during extinction of an aversively conditioned visual stimulus, potentiated the reflex eyeblink response in humans and whether this potentiation varied with the change in affective valence of the conditioned stimulus. Sixty college students were randomly assigned to view a series of two slides, depicting either unpleasant/highly arousing, unpleasant/moderate arousing, neutral/calm, pleasant/moderate arousing or pleasant/highly arousing scenes and objects (duration: 8 sec). During preconditioning (8 trials) and extinction (24 trials) acoustic startle probes (white noise bursts [50 ms; 95 dBA] were administered during and between slide presentation). During acquisition (16 trials) CS+ was reinforced by an electric shock. Startle response magnitudes significantly increased from preconditioning to extinction and were substantially larger to CS+. Conditioned startle reflex augmentation linearly increased with the pleasantness of the slides. Furthermore, subjects showed a greater post-conditioning increase of judged aversiveness to slides that they had previously reported to be more pleasant, exactly paralleling the startle reflex results.

     

Response-contingent stimulation as a treatment for developmental failure in infancy

An 8-month-old infant with a developmental quotient of $\text{1}\text{1}\text{2}$ months was given response-contingent stimulation using a pressure-sensitive pillow which turned an overhead mobile. The subject learned to control the mobile by kicking the pillow, and concurrently began smiling at both the mobile and her mother for the first time. After mastering three contingencies on arm, head, and leg movement, she displayed what appeared to be a Piagetian coordinated secondary circular reaction, in which one response provided 4 seconds of access to another contingency. Although the subject remains severely retarded, the results suggest that some forms of developmental delay may be treated at least in part as a failure to develop contingency awareness.     

Facilitation and helplessness: The interaction of perceived difficulty and importance of a task

Experimentally induced failure sometimes produces helplessness and sometimes facilitation on subsequent tasks. A model which accounts for this in terms of variations in perceived task difficulty and importance and variations in the cost of effort is proposed. Predictions from the model were confirmed in two experiments using the finger shuttlebox. When subjects expected the test task to be easy, importance of test outcome did not affect performance. However, when they expected the test task to be difficult, low outcome importance led to debilitation, and high importance to facilitation. If, in this condition, subjects experienced initial failure on the task perceived as difficult and important, helplessness rather than facilitation was observed. The model proposed may account for some of the conflicting results obtained in laboratory studies of human helplessness.